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Event notes from Agile War Stories held at ustwo

I went to the London office of ustwo to listen a panel talk about introducing agile to big business. I enjoyed the event, good drinks and food and friendly staff were around to chat. The panel was a good mix of people who worked with agile in startups, large organisations, government and traditional businesses that use waterfall.

Below are notes that I took during the panel discussions

Agile doesn’t have to be done strictly as one style, take the best

You are not agile or agile, you only become more agile

Adopting agile is not easy and it doesn’t guarantee anything

Changing how people think and work… Can be hard

Is agile for everyone? -> Yes but different personalities of people can require adjustment

Agile can be something that builds the wrong thing quickly

Q: What does agile means? Ability to change, communication

What is the least we can do to get most learnings.

The only certain thing is time

Agile requires building trust

Build it, show it. Then decide to either go forward or scrap

You are not locked to a bad idea/concept with agile

Workshops can help build trust at the beginning. Share your learnings by playing back to stakeholders

How to start with agile: You don’t need to wait. Start small, ground up. Ground up hits a limit of adoption within organisation. To make agile stick, everyone needs to be involved

In the questioning period there was a discussion on how to manage senior stakeholders who have expertise and want to deliver their vision even if these features do not resonant well with users.

Take them along the journey

Use data and research to back up your decisions

Building things with user needs alone you can miss the big picture. If you ask what people want then they want more efficient versions of reality. Instead of making a knee jerk reaction, we want to find out the why they want that – analyse their needs. Otherwise you could end up building the Homer car.

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2 thoughts on “Event notes from Agile War Stories held at ustwo”

Instead of “Agile can be something that builds the wrong thing quickly” it should be “Agile can be something that starts to build the wrong thing but it is identified quickly”.

Every collaborative iteration should be a step closer to what the business wants. So whilst what you say maybe true for a single iteration (or sprint), there should be no way that you reach the end of a project with the “wrong thing”.

That’s something much more attributable to Waterfall style approaches, where the requirements were either misinterpreted at some point or the situation changed along the way.